With the summer coming to an end there is increasing activity in the Symfony community in the form of bundles. Recently four interesting Symfony bundles have had interesting status updates: EasyLogHandler, eZ Migration Bundle, Netgen Layouts and Sylius.

The EasyLogHandler Bundle introduced

Symfony does quite a bit of logging and sometimes it might be a bit overwhelming. To come to the aid Javier Eguiluz has created a new log Monolog handler bundle to simplify the output. The main benefits over the standard logger are:

It adds a large header and some new lines to separate each request logs;

If the request is less significant (e.g. Assetic requests) the header is more compact and displays less information;

Log messages are divided internally so you can better understand their different parts (request, doctrine, security, etc.)

eZ Migration Bundle is being refactored

The eZ Migration bundle allows users of the eZ Publish 5.x and eZ Platform content management tools to create compled data migrations in a simple YAML format. With the custom DSL developers can execute changes in a structured manner, as discussed in the article introducing the Kaliop Migrations Bundle.

During the last few weeks the Kaliop UK team has been busy doing a significant overhaul of the bundle. With a complete refactoring of the code in the upcoming 2.0 version of the bundle, there are some significant changes under the hood, including:

Updated database structure and (untested) support for PostgreSQL or any other database supported by Doctrine DBAL

Improved status commands that give more information on when migrations were executed, why they may have failed and a delta of the migration ran and their current state

Support for custom migrations in PHP (as well as the earlier raw SQL)

Improved extension points that allow developers to extend the bundle with their own functionality

Netgen Layouts to manage Symfony front ends

Netgen Layouts is a new bundle from Netgen, a well known member of the eZ ecosystem. The Croatian company also works with other Symfony projects, including Sylius and has now created a new bundle for managing layouts in eZ as well as any other Symfony Framework based applications:

Netgen Layouts is an add-on tool on top of an existing CMS or e-commerce system. It should serve as a strong collaboration point where site builders, UX designers, and developers can manage and maintain the website layout structure in a simple but extensible way.

The tool allows Symfony developers to manage site layouts using the common concepts of Layouts, Blocks and Zones. These elements are controlled using a visual Block Management.

Sylius to reach 1.0-Beta in November

Sylius is one of the leading options for doing eCommerce on top of Symfony. The tool has been in development for a number of year and is already powering quite a few online marketplaces. But one thing deterring some developers from Sylius has been it's release status.

The product has yet to reach the official 1.0 release, but this was announced to be coming later this year and now in a blog post the Sylius team is detailing the path to the first beta of the stable release, with some pretty big changes:

WebBundle and old UI are going away, completely new shop and admin interfaces, v1.0.0-alpha around the corner; some non-essential features removed, focus on stabilization and docs, v1.0.0-beta by the end of November, which is based on the current velocity and Scrum development process.

Full details on the immediate Sylius eCommerce platform roadmap are available in the latest blog post on the developer blog: Sylius Roadmap Update